Finally, a priest who dares to speak out: "A Christian Duty in the Face of Terror"

This article by the New York priest, Father George Rutler, should be read by all people who still care about Western civilization. Here are extracts from the article:

After another devastating ISIS attack in France, this time against a priest in his 80s while he was saying Mass, the answer isn’t just, “Do nothing.” As racism distorts race and sexism corrupts sex — so does pacifism affront peace.
Turning the other cheek is the counsel Christ gave in the instance of an individual when morally insulted: Humility conquers pride. It has nothing to do with self-defense.

The Catholic Church has always maintained that the defiance of an evil force is not only a right but an obligation. Its Catechism (cf. #2265) cites St. Thomas Aquinas: “Legitimate defense can be not only a right but a grave duty for someone responsible for another’s life, the common good of the family or of the State.”
A father is culpable if he does not protect his family. A bishop has the same duty as a spiritual father of his sons and daughters in the church, just as the civil state has as its first responsibility the maintenance of the “tranquility of order” through self-defense.--

Were it not for Charles Martel at Tours in 732 and Jan Sobieski at the gates of Vienna in 1683 — and most certainly had Pope Saint Pius V not enlisted Andrea Doria and Don Juan at Lepanto in 1571 — we would not be here now.  No Western nations as we know them — no universities, no modern science, no human rights — would exist.--

The dormancy of Islam until recent times, however, has obscured the threat that this poses — especially to a Western civilization that has grown flaccid in virtue and ignorant of its own moral foundations.

The shortcut to handling the crisis is to deny that it exists.
On the first day of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, there were over 60 speeches, and yet not one of them mentioned ISIS.
Vice has destroyed countless individual souls, but in the decline of civilizations, weakness has done more harm than vice. --

The priest in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvrary in Normandy, France, was not the first to die at the altar — and he will not be the last.
In his old age, the priest embodied a civilization that has been betrayed by a generation whose hymn was John Lennon's "Imagine" — that there was neither heaven nor hell but "above us only sky" and "all the people living for today." When reality intrudes, they can only leave teddy bears and balloons at the site of a carnage they call "inexplicable."

Pope Francis - A strong believer in the global warming religion

Make no mistake, Pope Franics is above all an ardent believer in the global warming religion. This is what the Pope - in reality a leftist greenie - told his listerners a couple of days ago:

Pope Francis is warning that it would be “catastrophic” if special interests get in the way of a global agreement to curb the fossil fuel emissions blamed for global warming at a meeting next week in Paris over climate change. In a speech to the African U.N. headquarters on Thursday, Francis said the Paris negotiations mark a crucial step in developing a new energy system that “corrects the dysfunctions and distortions” of the current model of development and fights poverty.                 Francis has made ecological concerns a hallmark of his nearly 3-year-old papacy. But on Thursday, he took particular aim at those who deny the science behind climate change.

Pope Francis and Egypt´s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi on Islam

Here is an interesting comparison:

In a speech to Egypt’s top Islamic authorities, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi called for a “religious revolution.” Why? Because he believes that Islam has problems: “That corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the centuries … is antagonizing the entire world.” He continued: “Is it possible that 1.6 billion people should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants…?” He then warned the assembled imams not to “remain trapped within this mindset” but to “reflect on it from a more enlightened perspective.”
However you interpret el-Sisi’s remarks, it’s clear that he believes the problems of Islam are not the fault of a tiny minority. He seems to think that a great many are to blame, and he particularly singles out Islamic religious leaders, whom he holds “responsible before Allah” on “Judgment Day.” And, most tellingly, he refuses to indulge in the this-has-nothing-to-do-with-Islam excuse favored by Western leaders. Rather, he states that “the entire umma [Islamic world]” is “a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world” because of “the thinking that we hold most sacred.”
By contrast, after his visit to Turkey, Pope Francis compared Islamic fundamentalists to Christian fundamentalists and said that “in all religions there are these little groups.” A little over a year ago in his apostolic exhortation, he joined the ranks of those who say that terror has nothing to do with Islam by observing that “authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence.”
So the leader of the largest Muslim country in the Arab world thinks that the entire Islamic world is suffused with dangerous and destructive thinking, and the leader of the Catholic Church thinks terror is the work of a few misunderstanders of Islam.

Read the entire article here.

Pope Francis and Global Warming

Pope Francis has so far been silent on global warming/climate change.

The church of global warming has many supporters in the Catholic Church. When Pope Francis was elected in March they all had great expectations. Some of the most fanatic warmists have not abstained from putting words into the Pope's mouth in order to prove that he is a fellow warmist :

On 31 March 2013 Francis used his first Easter homily to make a plea for peace throughout the world, specifically mentioning the Middle-East, Africa, and North and South Korea.^[212] He also spoke out against those who give in to "easy gain" in a world filled with greed, and made a plea for humanity to become a better guardian of creation by protecting the environment

The pope’s homily was striking for its repeated references to environmental protection, highlighting what is likely to be a central theme of his papacy and setting up the 76-year-old pope as a leading activist against climate change.

Source


Let’s hope that Pope Francis follows in his predecessor's footsteps and adopts an aggressive stance on fighting climate change around the world, a growing scourge on the world’s poor that the UN estimates is killing 1,000 children a day and costing the global economy $1.2 trillion a year. That's a toll that will rise to unfathomable levels if we don’t cut our addition to dirty fuels.

Source


In the recently published biography, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots, Paul Vallely notes that the Pope is planning a major encyclical on environmental matters. In a move which will drive conservatives to distraction, Pope Francis has asked Leonardo Boff to send him his writings on eco-theology as part of his preparation. Boff was a major figure in the liberation theology movement and his writings were closely scrutinised by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Indeed his book, Church: Charism and Power was the subject of a notification from the Congregation.

In an interview in 2010 Boff noted:

There are regions in the world that have changed so much that they've become uninhabitable. That is why there are 60 million displaced persons in Africa and Southeast Asia, which are the most affected by climate change and which emit less carbon. If we don't stop it, in the next five to seven years there will be as many as 100 million climate refugees, and that is going to create political problems.

It will not be difficult for the Pope to connect this issue with his own very public concerns on the plight of refugees.

Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez de Maradiaga confirmed during a recent visit to Australia that Pope Francis is indeed planning a document on the environment. The Cardinal is chair of the group of eight cardinals chosen by Francis to advise him, and is a strong proponent of action on climate change. A strong and clear statement from Francis on climate change will be heard all around the world. The Pope has proven himself an able and direct communicator and a document from him will be difficult for our political leaders to ignore.

Source

 

 

Don’t take our word for it. Ask the pope. Or, ask the members of the Social Concerns Team at St. Peter Catholic Church in Huron, where a Nov. 12 program will explore the issue.

The program is “Melting Ice, Mending Creation: A Catholic Approach to Climate Change.”

“The pope, Pope Francis, is behind this,” said Karen Giaco, a member of the Social Concerns Team at the church.    The pope has asked Catholic churches to educate as many people as possible about the effects of everyone’s carbon footprint on the planet, Giaco said.

“The biggest part of this is that the poor and the most vulnerable are going to be affected the hardest,” she said. “Everybody needs to make a change.”

Source

An organisation calling itself the Catholic Coalition on Climate Change, which is running the global warming propaganda website Catholic Climate Covenant, has published quotes on climate change by Pope Francis' predecessor. The Catholic Climate Covenant also has a page with Quotes from Pope Francis on Creation/Environment.

It is worth noting that the words climate change or global warming are nowhere to be found among the quotes. Neither do any of the catholic or other global warming fanatics, who expect to Pope to be one of them, produce any evidence that Pope Francis actually has used the words climate change or global warming in his speeches or writings. (Please correct me, if I am wrong on this).

Pope Francis is clearly worried about environmental questions. But that is not the same thing as being a firm believer in human induced global warming. It is of course possible that the Pope will turn out to join the AGW believers in his forthcoming encyclical on environmental matters. But so far he has not done it, based on what he has said and written.

To the attention of the soon to be elected new Pope

A global warming message by Greenpeace, WWF, Friends of the Earth or perhaps even UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon?:

Industrialised countries are responsible for 70% of carbon dioxide emitted since the start of the industrial era. Developing countries have the least capacity to cope and are most vulnerable to changes in weather patterns, catastrophic storms and other effects of climate change.

Our message is to achieve effective climate justice the polluter must pay. 

Climate change threatens the sustainable use of the land, the water resources of our planet, and the very existence of some countries. It will have adverse effects on food security, both agriculture and fishing, already a major issue in parts of the world. New patterns of natural disasters will impact adversely on the battle against poverty and the achievement of the Millenium Development Goals. 

Inevitably the bad effects of climate change will be felt most by those who are already poor. As women are the great majority among the poor, the effects of climate change will further increase their vulnerability. Decreased agricultural productivity, increases in waterborne diseases, and accelerating desertification are all impacts of climate change which will impact in a greater degree on women because of the type of work they do in developing countries.

No, it is the Catholic Church voicing its opinion through Caritas, the confederation of 164 Roman Catholic relief, development and social service organisations operating in over 200 countries and territories worldwide.

Caritas has - and probably still is - been doing a lot of excellent relief and social work in different parts of the world. How sad then that this once so respected organization has allowed itself to be hijacked by the global warming alarmists. 

The process of picking a successor to Pope Benedict XVI has officially gone underway today in Rome. One can only hope and pray that the papal conclave will end up electing someone, who is prepared to put an end to this kind of global warming madness within the Roman Catholic Church. 

Catholic bishops in the US jumping on the climate change bandwagon

The Catholic Church in the US is jumping on the climate change bandwagon: 

The Catholic Coalition on Climate Change “and our partners,” which include the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Catholic Relief Services, and Catholic Charities USA, are inviting Catholic parishes, colleges, and schools to show Sun Come Up on or before October 4, the feast of St. Francis of Assisi.

The Oscar-nominated documentary, according to its web site, “shows the human face of climate change. The film follows the relocation of the Carteret Islanders, a community living on a remote island chain in the South Pacific Ocean, and now, some of the world’s first environmental refugees.”

The "documentary", which the Catholic bishops and other organizations "invite" parishes, colleges and schools to show is of course nothing but environmental spin. The Carteret Islands, as well as other Pacific low-laying atolls, are not sinking because of climate change. 

Fortunately there are cooler heads among US Catholics, like Dr. Jeff Mirus, who has written a very sensible article on climate change:

It seems likely, after all, that what we are witnessing in the furor over climate change is a rerun of the wildly off-base population explosion announced in the 1960s, or the brief romance with a threatened ice age in the next decade, or the treatment of pregnancy as a disease, or the pressing need for safe sex, or the horrors of growing up in a world in which not everyone respects and affirms our every choice. These have all been made the moral basis for social, political and economic action, yet most people in our culture understand these issues either badly or wrongly. Worse still, the actions taken at best waste time, energy and resources and at worst either make the problem worse or create new problems in their wake.

Think how much more good could be done if those who are rushing to join the climate change crusade, especially as it relates to yet another set of coercive government policies, were to put even half of their fervor into living chastely, protecting the lives of the unborn, discouraging divorce, nurturing families, participating actively in local churches and community organizations, supporting neighborhood health clinics, promoting charitable work, or actually lending a hand to those in concrete, discernible and remediable need. Instead of trying to be seen on the “moral high ground” of the latest fashionable cause (be it whales, diversity, gender-neutral speech, or climate change), we could all actually begin to construct a better world one person at a time.

After observing the secular social order for some fifty years, I am absolutely convinced that both the human person and society as a whole have a deep need for a moral orientation, and when a society either rejects or ignores the natural law and Divine Revelation because these conflict with inordinate desires, then people are strongly drawn to ersatz causes in order to achieve moral satisfaction while distracting themselves from deeper issues. The effort to get climate change documentaries into parishes and Catholic schools is, I believe, a signal example of this common failing, arising as it does from an almost willful refusal on the part of the proponents to open their eyes to the for more pressing moral infections which have already metastasized in our culture like a deadly cancer.

A study of climate science in educational institutions is certainly both appropriate and important. As with knowledge of almost anything else, but especially of those things which may affect our lives, we should want to study climate and learn what we can about it. But we also need to recall that there have been significant climate changes before, even during the past few thousand years of recorded human history, complete with widespread shifts in what crops could be grown in different places and where people preferred to live. One thinks, for example, of the Medieval Warm Period which affected Europe and other regions between about 950 and 1250, which was followed by the so-called Little Ice Age. We probably do not even have a long enough window of serious climate study to know what we ought to consider the outer limits of “normal”.

In any case, it will take far more study, with far more accurate and universally respected results, over a much longer period of time before our limited human comprehension can form a true picture of what is happening, why it is happening, whether it is a source of long-term concern, and whether there is anything particular to be done about it. Under these circumstances, making climate change into a moral priority—that is, a guilt trip—is extraordinarily imprudent. It will serve as more than a distraction. Like many a cause célèbre before it, climate change will become an excuse to ignore the damage done through human relationships that are sadly based on a rejection of God and the natural law.

Read the entire article here

Catholic bishops urge Filipinos to recite a global warming prayer

The victims of the recent heavy floods in the Philippines deserve all our sympathy. Hopefully they will receive the assistance they need, also from the Catholic church. 

However, the prayer that the secretary for the Catholic Bishops´ Conference of the Philippines urges Filipinos to recite because of the flooding is questionable, to say the least: 

“Almighty Father, we raise our hearts to You in gratitude for the wonders of creation of which we are part, for Your providence in sustaining us in our needs, and for Your wisdom that guides the course of the universe.

“We acknowledge our sins against You and the rest of creation.

“We have not been good stewards of Nature.

“We have confused Your command to subdue the earth.

“The environment is made to suffer our wrongdoing, and now we reap the harvest of our abuse and indifference.

“Global warming is upon us. Typhoons, floods, volcanic eruption, and other natural calamities occur in increasing number and intensity.

“We turn to You, our loving Father, and beg forgiveness for our sins.

“We ask that we, our loved ones and our hard earned possessions be spared from the threat of calamities, natural and man-made.

“We beseech You to inspire us all to grow into responsible stewards of Your creation, and generous neighbors to those in need.

“Amen.”

Read the entire article here

The Catholic church makes a serious mistake in joining the church of global warming. The radical far left enviro-fundamentalists are dangerous bedfellows for the Christian church.